Identifying congestion in a network has been a long-term goal in the field of networking. Many schemes have been proposed to date for identifying and avoiding congested segments of a network. However, most of these schemes still cannot rapidly detect congestion. This is often because most of the proposed solutions require control plane processes to detect queue congestion. Accordingly, there is a need for forwarding elements with robust data plane congestion identification, and a reporting mechanism that can detect congestion within the data plane in real time at data line rates that the forwarding elements forward data messages.